One Darn Fine Sweetroll
by Norroen Dyrd
Summary: The unexpected friendship between a little orphaned Orcish girl and a priest of Mara did not last more than a few days - but it was enough for that girl to make a certain choice when she grew up.
1. Chapter 1

The children lay quite still, not daring as much as to breathe, their ears aching with the effort of listening to silence. It was dark in the orphanage dorm, so dark that it made no difference if they closed their eyes or kept them open. So they lay blind and mute, all their senses dead except for hearing; they were half a dozen pairs of ears, curled up beneath grimy, torn blankets, probing the night stillness, sifting through it in search of any slightest hint of a noise, like a prospector sifts through river silt in search of gold. Finally, it came - the sound they had all been waiting for. The low, sob-like creak of the front door. They lifted themselves slowly on their elbows, each mentally pleading his or her heart to stop hammering so loudly against their ribs; they were now transformed into half a dozen pairs of eyes, peering into the black nothing ahead of them. For a while, it remained impenetrable, unyielding - and then, suddenly, it came alive, chased away by a tiny flicker of bluish light, which soon blossomed into a hovering orb the size of a fist, revealing a small figure, skinny, thin-necked and large-headed like the rest of the children, standing with its legs wide apart, a sizeable, bulging sack hoisted over its shoulder.

'Umtaz... Is that you?' one of the boys asked in a hoarse, faltering whisper, leaning forward eagerly.

The small apparition snorted, 'Of course it's me, Asbjorn!'

The children snickered into their bedclothes - the midnight visitor had pronounced the boy's name in a way that made it sound quite rude.

'And I got plenty o'yummy swag!' Umtaz went on, tiptoeing closer to the beds and flinging the sack down onto the only one that was empty. The orb of light had followed close behind, and its faint glow now made it apparent that Umtaz was a young Orcish girl, not more than ten years old, with two tiny fangs, just beginning to stick out from beneath her lower lip, large, almond-shaped blue eyes and all hair shaved off her head save for a dark fringe, combed carelessly behind her left ear. She plopped down beside her unloaded burden and grinned at the silently, apprehensively watching children, dangling her legs nonchalantly, 'Well? Are you gonna get down to unpacking or not? There's plenty for everyone - cheese, and sausages, and a honey jar...'

With small, piteous groans of longing, they stumbled out of their beds and gathered round Umtaz, hands outstretched, tugging at the string with which the sack was tied, groping for its contents with trembling fingers. Asbjorn, however, remained where he was, following Umtaz's every move with his intent, sullen gaze, his eyebrows knitted together in a suspicious frown. 'How did you get all these things?' he asked at length. 'You stole them, didn't you? _Didn't you?'_

Umtaz, who had been helping a smaller girl jerk out an almost impossibly enormous apple pie, looked up at him and shrugged her bony shoulders impatiently, 'Will you _ever_ think of a different question? Like, what's my favourite colour, or have I ever kissed a boy? Come on, does it really matter that much to you? The important thing is, I keep all of us fed; right, gang?'

'Right!' everyone echoed in an enthusiastic chorus.

'Stop being a prig, Asbjorn! Just let it go!' someone added through a mouthful of white bread with raisins.

But the obstinate little Nord simply refused to 'let it go'.

'You are my friend, Umtaz,' he said, his voice quiet and earnest. 'And I'd hate to see you become like one of those big kids - Bryn, or Vex, or...'

'At least Bryn and Vex don't go hungry,' Umtaz objected sensibly. 'Now, how about you quit your whining and do something useful - I've got a chunk of raw beef here, and it ain't gonna cook itself!'

With a deep sigh of resignation, Asbjorn finally crawled from beneath his rag of a blanket, squatted down on the floor beside his bed and lifted the three loose floorboards that concealed the children's secret treasury - a small hollow space filled to the brim with all manner of things not allowed by Grelod, the orphanage's caregiver, including a doll with a missing arm and straw stuffing bursting out through the seams (the girls were forbidden to play with dolls because Grelod thought that caring for these make-believe children might stir within them the blasphemous thoughts of being adopted), a mouldy old spellbook that Umtaz had found in a trash heap and used to secretly practice casting orbs of light - and most importantly, a tiny piece of flint, which the children reverently called The Stone. This awe-inspiring mineral had been given to Asbjorn as a birthday present by Balimund, the local blacksmith, who would sometimes come by and try to coax Grelod into allowing him to adopt the boy, - and on many a night, it would chase away the bitter cold when Asbjorn used it to light a makeshift campfire right on the dorm floor, in the middle of a pile of pebbles, also kept in the treasury, which the children would use to prevent the fire from spreading.

'What are we gonna use for kindling?' Asbjorn whispered in a business-like manner, after taking the necessary materials out of the treasury.

Umtaz grinned at him and produced a stack of crumpled papers, which had been stuffed inside her only, but very spacious, pocket, 'Here. I grabbed these when I dropped by at the temple on my way back here'.

A serious-looking girl with neat pigtails bent down to examine the papers more closely - and gave a terrified gasp, 'The pamphlets on Mara?! How could you?!'

Umtaz rolled up her eyes in a deliberate display of contempt, 'Mara-Shmara! All these pamfels... pamlets... _things_ are good for is starting a fire! I took a look at them - they are all about love, and 'sharing is caring', and comforting each other in the, uh, hours of need, and all that rot. Who are these priest people to tell us this stuff? What do they know? I bet they haven't never been hurt, or lonely, or miserable - bet they haven't never cried themselves to sleep!'

'Haven't _ever,'_ the pigtailed girl corrected her sulkily. But Umtaz made no reply; she was too busy helping Asbjorn keep the fire strong enough to get the beef roasted and weak enough for Grelod not to wake up from the smell of smoke and burst in on them.


	2. Chapter 2

It was humiliating. A bunch of pots and pans tied to a string stretched across the threshold - the oldest booby trap in the book! And she had walked right into it! She should have stuck to clearing out open-air stalls in the marketplace, but no, she had to get all grown-up and try to take on a real store!

Umtaz bit hard into her upper lip with her baby fangs to fight back burning tears of shame and indignation and took yet another elaborate turn round the street corner. Neither the shopkeeper nor the guards had caught sight of her - but she knew they were somewhere out there, searching, sniffing her out in the maze of dark lanes like ever so many bloodhounds. She had been running from their heavy footsteps for the past half an hour, and, what with the sharp pain in her left side and the taste of blood in her mouth, it did not look like she would be running much longer. She needed a place where she could lie low and wait until the guards got tired of chasing emptiness and stopped lurking so persistently round the orphanage, not letting her slip inside, dive into her bed and pretend she had never left it. And she eventually found it - a tall stone building, looming, shadow-like, in the pale light of the twin moons, its door abandoned, unguarded, begging to be opened and then shut by a small green-skinned thief seeking shelter. The temple of Mara.

The murk inside was deep, soft and warm, quite unlike the hollow, cold darkness of the orphanage that would taint Umtaz's dreams on those rare nights when she stayed indoors; it smelled of old parchment, and incense, and burning candles - a comforting, drowsy smell that made her slow down, and take a deep breath, and forget about her aching legs and weary, wheezing lungs. She perched herself apprehensively on the very edge of one of the back pews and glanced around in mild interest; she had only been here once before, and that was to grab a bunch of pamphlets for kindling, but now she had much, much more time at her disposal.

Soon enough, however, she began to shift uneasily in her seat, a stifling hot wave rushing from her collar bones to the tips of her ears, completely unsettled by the steady, melancholy gaze of the goddess' statue in the far end of the hall. It was all nonsense, of course, and Umtaz mentally scolded herself with quite a number of words she had picked up in the streets, of which 'milk drinker' was the mildest, but she just couldn't help imagining that Mara knew what she had been up to lately, and was not at all pleased. It was as if she was about to come to life and say, moving her gilded finger from side to side in a reproachful gesture, 'You have been a bad girl, Umtaz. What do you have to say for yourself?'

'Quit staring at me,' Umtaz whispered fiercely, getting up and forcing herself to tiptoe closer to the statue. 'I know you're one of the Divines and all that, but my business is my business, okay?'

The goddess ignored her and went on staring, not a muscle moving on her tearful mask of a face. Umtaz crept closer, determined to throw her loot sack - which this time she had failed to fill - over the statue's head... It was then that she realized that, apart from her and the infuriatingly motionless goddess, there was someone else in the temple.

In fact, if she had made one more step forward, she would surely have tripped over him. Or probably_ her;_ Umtaz was not too sure. All that she could discern was a dimly outlined figure of a robed grown-up, kneeling so low that his (or her) head touched the floor, arms stretched out towards the statue's feet. Umtaz hovered on one spot for a few seconds, pondering intensely whether the grown-up was dead and if letting out the scream that had been stirred within her by her discovery and was thrashing against her teeth, like a captured beast thrashes against the bars of its cage, would be too milk-drinkerish. But just as she was taking the long preparatory breath, on the verge of releasing her mouth's wild prisoner, she stopped mid-way, allowing the scream to dissolve into a faint gasp, struck by yet another revelation - or rather, several revelations. The grown-up was a he, and he was definitely alive - and he was praying. Though, come to think of it, his hoarse, feverish whisper sounded nothing like the few prayers Umtaz had heard in her life. He was talking more to himself than to the goddess, his voice slow and strained, pausing after every few words to take a few deep, shaky breaths, as if in great pain.

_'For years, I have been running from wildfire. A raging blaze of crimson, each tongue of flame swirling and twisting, shaping itself into a face. So many faces. The people I hurt. The people I killed. The people I betrayed. All melting together in one fiery haze. And it seems that the fire has finally caught up with me. I am charred on the inside. Empty. Completely, utterly empty. My soul is nothing more than a handful of ashes. It is agonizing, living like this. If only I could fill that hollow space. If only something, anything could spring to life from those ashes. If only... But I think I know what I must do to feel whole once more. I must turn back. Face my past. Right my wrongs. And I can't do that. I am too afraid. I am a coward. Always have been. Always will be. I do not deserve to be priest. I do not deserve to be a Dunmer. I do not deserve to live. Worthless. Worthless! Worthless!'_

That last word, which the grown-up repeated over and over, came out of his mouth like a dagger comes out of a wound, half a groan, half a sob - and before she knew it, Umtaz found herself sobbing too, quietly, piteously, her eyes burning and half-blinded, her lower lip trembling. She did not understand half of what the grown-up had said, but that didn't stop her from abandoning all her fear of milk-drinkerizing herself and giving way to an overwhelming outburst of emotion. Though she _did _rush out of the temple before her sniffing got too loud.

As she crept cautiously back to the orphanage, her path finally appearing to be guard-free, Umtaz made up her mind to somehow compensate for the pamphlets she'd stolen and the harsh way she'd talked about Mara and her priests. That grown-up had called himself a priest, and she was certain that he was both hurt, and lonely, and miserable - and all things considered, she wouldn't put crying himself to sleep past him either.


End file.
